Everyone knows that a man's weakest spot is his groin, a playful punch to a man's family jewels can leave him writhing around the floor in agony. American entrepreneur Jeremiah Raber decided to reinvent the groin guard to be stronger and able to take more than a punch. So to test his new product, he bravely volunteered to get his crotch shot at with a rifle! Fortunately for him, his groin guard is bulletproof and his twig and berries came away unscathed.

Raber, the mastermind behind Armored Nutshellz, performed the jaw-dropping stunt in collaboration with his friend Matt Heck (the guy with the rifle) and recorded it to raise publicity for his Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. The video shows the 38-year-old arranging the cup into place underneath his jeans and standing next to a tree while Heck takes aim.

“We take product testing very seriously,” he later says on camera. “Don’t try this at home.” He then pulls down his jeans, and Heck pulls the trigger. Raber surprisingly manages to walk away unharmed from the death-defying experiment, proving that he has balls of steel and his company does make the “strongest jockstrap in the world”. The video titled “Bulletproof Balls” has almost 100,000 views.

Raber takes a hammer to Nutshellz and proves that other than scuffing it, it does not take any other damages

Of course, no one would buy it expecting that they might one day get their manhood shot off. Raber just had to take it to the extreme and introduce the Armored Nutshellz with a big bang. Raber says that the protector was designed with mixed martial arts fighters in mind. When he first started work on it, he wanted to help them better absorb blows to the testicles to prevent infertility, so he built a shell made of Kevlar laminated with a ‘ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene’ called Dyneema, which makes it able to withstand extreme punishment while offering a high degree of comfort for the wearer.

After six years of fine tuning and adjustments, Raber is finally ready to market Armored Nutshellz to guys all over the world who needs some extra protection for their royal gems through Kickstarter. Armored Nutshellz has been getting moderate attention not only just from athletes, but also from the police and military personnel. Unfortunately, for Raber, he’s having trouble getting production off the ground, as he still has to make them himself on a machine press in his basement.

“If I got thousands of orders I would be screwed,” he told the Riverfront Times, adding that he needs about $500,000 to build up production of Nutshellz. His bizarre gunshot-to-the-groin experiment was meant to draw in investors, but if that fails, he plans to go on Shark Tank, and pitch his invention to the panel of judges, which includes Dallas Mavericks owner, Marc Cuban.

Until then, Raber hopes to raise over $30,000 through his Kickstarter campaign, just to keep Nutshellz afloat. He claims to have already spent $200,000 from his own pocket creating the world’s strongest groin guard. But things are not looking very good for him as the project on Kickstarter only has less than $2,000 worth of pledges.